Keren Toledano

Keren Toledano is a self-taught artist based in New York City. She received her BA in English from Harvard and her MA in Arts & Humanities Education from NYU. She worked as a literary agent, Hollywood story editor, freelance writer and film archivist, before committing herself to the creative life. After publishing several short stories in literary... journals, writers block led her to explore fine art. In her first solo show in 2017, THE ACT BUT NOT THE THING IS SACRED, she coupled abstract collage with excerpts from her torn up storiesa reminder never to marry her darlings. She now splits her time between painting and writing, finding connections across disciplines. In addition to collaborations with interior designers and art publishers, her work has been featured at international fairs and in various magazines. Making marks was the very first form of communication, a primal and primitive means of connection. Abstract art invites a return to this realm of prelinguistic language. When I developed writers block, I was prompted to explore the syntax and grammar of painterly marks. Stains on raw canvas are unformed thoughts, geometric shapes emphatic proclamations. Breaking the flatness of the canvas, three-dimensional fabric scraps are actions taken in response to ideas. Occasionally, bits of my writing intervene in the story, pulling us back to known associations. Everything put down is action/reaction. In the absence of words, outside formal language, our stories become more universalspeaking as they do to the commonalities that join us.Read More